


On the Topic of Courtship

by Like_a_Hurricane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Lupercalia, M/M, Valentines, shameless holiday fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 11:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shameless little holiday fluff drabble. Because I love you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Topic of Courtship

Loki had long ago been aware of a celebration amongst mortals known as Lupercalia, but it had been a very long time since then, and he had almost forgotten about it, until almost a full millennia since he had last set foot anywhere near Rome.

The air in New York was cold and, dressed warmly as he was in Midgardian formal garb, complete with a fine scarf, even a frost Jotunn could see his breath. True, he wasn’t channeling his more elemental aspect, but he still barely felt the cold, in all truth. He had never been bothered by it. The scarf, long outer coat, and fine leather gloves with black rabbit-fur on their interior: they preserved in him enough heat to maintain a less-blue appearance. The pretense was purely aesthetic.

Loki was staring at a store interior decked out to the nines in shining red, not-anatomically-correct representations of hearts, and myriad references to something called “Valentines”.

His true introduction to the idea of the holiday had been from Dr. Jane Foster, who had started off explaining to Thor what it meant to some people emotionally, but a few pointed questions from the thunderer’s dark-haired adoptive brother, however chained up and untrustworthy he had been at the time, had somehow triggered from the woman a passionate rant about Saint Valentine, and how truly unromantic his death had been, and how meaningless the holiday truly was except from a marketing standpoint, and some vague idea of commercialized romance.

That rant was flooding back through the trickster’s brain as he stared at many more over-enthusiastic, highly plastic decorations attributable to the holiday of Valentines Day, as he walked through New York City’s streets.

He had been acting as king of Asgard for some time, now. He had been caught by Thor once or twice, on visits to Midgard, enough that his brother knew that Loki was no longer dead, but none had otherwise figured out the rest of his ruses.

Well... none save for one.

Loki tended to walk around the city aimlessly, when the mad inventor Tony Stark, as a subject, weighed heavily on his mind.

Tony Stark had scoffed publicly at Valentines Day, in the past. Youtube had preserved a few examples from over the years forever in its older archives. Loki had found them. Why he had sought them out in the first place was... irrelevant.

Just as the fact that he knew Tony Stark had given Pepper Potts two surprisingly memorable and romantic Valentines Days during the course of their courtship––to the astonishment of all who knew them, privately and publicly alike––was also irrelevant.

It meant nothing.

Just as two years spent between the throne of Asgard, diplomacy throughout the realms in his own appearance and Odin’s, causing minor mischief for Thor in Midgard, and also intermittently spending time in the bed of one Anthony Stark, in the end, meant nothing. They had really excellent sex, of course, and discussed physics, magic, and all of the most fascinating puzzles where the nature of matter, energy and the universe itself was concerned, but that was it.

Nothing more.

None of them had ever reached for more, or shown any inclination of desiring it.

Not a single solitary sign.

It bothered Loki not at all.

So there was no reason that a single advertisement boasting that ‘Diamonds are Forever’ should anger the trickster so.

He knew a thousand ways to shatter a diamond.

Especially with any weapon made of Uru.

The thought niggled at him. It set alight the fires of forges deep within his brain, but he knew not what they anticipated the smithing of.

Restlessly, he continued to wander.

Advertisements assailed him at every turn. At one point, he was physically assaulted by shining silver-red-pink-and-gold balloons, nearly a hundred of them, most of them seeming to manage to hit him in the face. The store clerk who had been trying to tie them one by one to a fence railing, had apologized very profusely for having managed that feat.

Loki let her live, and trudged on.

He was certainly not sulking.

Then he turned a corner and felt his breath catch for a moment.

He realized, belatedly, that he was staring with far too much fixation at a television broadcasting a live interview with Tony Stark. It was playing over the bar of a small cafe. Loki stepped just far enough inside to better read the subtitles.

“No secret loves you might be wooing this time of year, Mr. Stark?”

Loki began to suspect the Norns were laughing at him, by now, and cursed his timing a thousand times.

On the television, something a little sad and wistful, almost hungering, yet resigned, flickered across Tony Stark’s expression, just for a moment, despite his polite-for-the-press smile still affixed firmly in the “on” position. It was something in the way his hand moved over the back of the couch he occupied, and the way the very fine lines at the corners of his eyes moved as the muscles there went lax with melancholy, only to re-tighten with false-mirth.

Loki knew lies when he saw them, before the man even said a word.

“No, not wooing. Nobody’s out for wooing, these days, or if they are, they aim for a more romantic Avenger,” he joked, full of self-deprecation. “I flirt, but I don’t woo.”

The trickster doubted his own motives too much to be certain whether the lie was in what he thought was wanted of him and knew better, or whether he wanted to be wooed, and believed capable of it such that someone would want it of him.

Perhaps he wanted...

Loki left the cafe with haste, calling himself a fool.

He continued to call himself a fool even as he slipped around a corner and vanished from Midgard entirely, that afternoon on February 13th.

 

~~

 

Halfway through February 14th, Tony was very very drunk.

He didn’t wake until nearly midnight, and when he did, he showered stumbled down to the lab to find some more stimulating occupation to keep him dragging along, distracted from his misery until the dawn when this sensation of stupid longing would ease a bit, holiday long past.

Once in the lab, he stared to stroll over to the table he usually used more for fine-tuning holograms than building anything upon and found it... unexpectedly occupied.

There were papers in his lab.

Not papers. Parchments. Honest-to-archaic, thick and heavy parchments, with complex formulae covering almost every inch of them, except thin half-inch margins from all the edges. Tony started trying to decipher them and got halfway down the first page, realizing he was looking at a recipe for a metal alloy he could barely comprehend when he laid eyes on a chunk of the metal in question.

Not a chunk. It was too finely crafted to be called that, really.

It was a face-plate. An Iron Man face-plate, of the sort that would fit most of his current armor models. The metal, Tony realized, looked very familiar. “JARVIS,” he said, his voice a bit rasping with the barest edge of lingering hangover and a little bit of breathlessness. “Scan. Compare...” He realized very belatedly that the ink all of those equations was written in was not black, but actually an incredibly dark green. Something frankly embarrassing happened in his stomach. “Compare to Mjolnir.”

“I already have, sir. That is indeed a sample of Uru metal. I was asked to confirm it ahead of time, but not to mention it to you until you discovered it,” the AI responded.

The inventor swallowed tightly, unsure what to make of the gift in front of him.

Loki had given him Uru. Down to the goddamned recipe.

_Why?_

“Because I couldn’t decipher your lie, but I have rarely encountered a hope within myself more stubborn,” the god of mischief said quietly, from a few feet behind him.

Tony jumped, spinning around and staring, his heart pounding. “Pardon?” he asked, sounding a little strangled.

“I could not tell if your misdirection was aimed at your need to dismiss how much you wanted to woo a target, or if you wished to be courted yourself, by one you desire,” Loki said, stepping closer once, then again when the inventor didn’t flinch away. “The other possibility was, of course, that you simply do not consider yourself worthy of either, and dare not think of that, but knowing you as I do, I like to thing there must be deeper complexities, still, than that.”

Tony opened his mouth to respond, but no sounds came out after a few seconds and he closed it again, swallowing tightly.

“Would you welcome suit from a god, Tony?” the god asked.

Reeling a bit, the inventor stared for a beat longer, then slowly reached out with one hand, his other still gripping the edge of the table behind him for anchorage. He grabbed the trickster’s scarf, both sides of it where it hung open on either side of his neck, and dragged him forward by it. “Yeah, I would,” he whispered. “I really would.”

“Happy Lupercalia,” Loki said, a little breathlessly.

“What?” Tony’s brow furrowed.

“You slept and then showered through the last hour or so of the 14th. The 15th is an older holiday. Remind me to tell you about Rome sometime... much later,” the trickster mused, and kissed him, firm and possessive, yet tender.

Without a thought, hesitation and doubts bleeding from him slowly, Tony kissed back, drawing the trickster closer still.

Holidays be damned. They had both needed this for far too long.


End file.
